Literature Review on Architecture for Smart-Product Service Systems

The evolution of products and services being offered through advances in digitalization technologies is leading to a change in the tradition information and communication architecture and infrastructure in industries. Products are being transformed into smart products and they offer additional services to satisfy customers’ needs. However, in addition to the product and service itself, there is a whole supporting system which needs to be developed or modified. There are a few frameworks and guidelines which support the development of the smart product itself or in combination with the smart services. However, there are few to no standards or guidelines for general architecture or infrastructure development for Smart Product-Service Systems (PSS), let alone focusing on integrated development of the entire system. The aim of this study is to further support this statement through a literature analysis. The literature research is based on the meta-narrative method. Two databanks were selected and searched for suitable literature with particular keywords. The results were filtered, analyzed and categorized according to their relevance to the research aim. The results are summarized under the three categories of architecture, methodology and elements for Smart PSS. Through this review process, it was possible to identify only five very relevant publications discussing methods to develop and integrate supporting system infrastructure. Twenty-one relevant researches provided architectural and methodological partial aspects to consider for the development and integration of systems. The analysis also enabled identification of research gaps. This study summarizes these findings, gaps and provides recommendations for future research.